The contemporary urban condition in the capital expansion border: patterns of spatial transformation in six cities of Pará, Brazil

Abstract

This text seeks to place the ‘city’ against the transformations occurying in Eastern Amazon and to identify a set of morphological patterns that are related to two competing trajectories of urban space structuring – urban-industrial and traditional – highlighting the potential legacy of the latter for innovating in urban design and planning. The patterns of evolution and occupation of six cities, located in an area that has been under intense transformations after the 1970s, are compared, making explicit a set of connections between morphological patterns and socioeconomic processes. The construction of the database used in this paper was based on field research carried out between 2012 and 2014 in the six cities studied under the framework of the Urbis Amazônia project. The methodological procedure includes a brief historical analysis and the characterization of the spatial structure of the city and of major events in the urban expansion of these cities, particularly on the action of public and private sectors. A new type of polynuclear urbanization in this region is identified. This occurs in complex times, where historical problems can be aggravated though the imposition of homogenizing rationales or be overcomed through the transition from the urban-industrial standard to a new stage of real possibilities for innovation, of a balanced relationship between nature and the rights of people and of representation of different rationales for sharing a territory.